Family recipes that live in memory, not cookbooks: The secret to a grandmother's 'Nayachevi' sweet legacy

Sometimes, you miss being a six-year-old.

You believe that adults can do anything.

While I quickly grew out of that idea, I still childishly harbour the belief that my grandmother, could do everything. She stitched the first few dresses for the only doll that I had. She told the same stories from Ramayan every day, and I still wanted to hear more.

And, she could bake, cook ‘things out of thin air’, as I believed as a child. She baked puddings, Christmas cakes, pastries, and cooked the trademark chicken, fish curries that I know wouldn’t exist in recipe books. Perhaps that’s what luxury feels like: something that can never be replicated, preserved only in memory.

She truly was a wonder at cooking, but there was one particular dish that she could bake, and no one knew how she did it.  I was four, when she brought out a bowl of a diamond-shaped sweet.

Diamond cuts, my parents called it at first.

But my Muthassi as I called her, firmly called it nayachevi (dog’s ears in Malayalam, because it resembled them), and the name stuck firmly. I might have appalled a few guests in childhood, because I would have offered the bowl and said, “Do you want dog ears?”

What was it exactly? Muthassi would dismiss it often and say that it was just boiled sugar, and I was too young to ask the technicalities of how she made it. You’re a child, you just want the sweet; you don’t think of much else. And so it became our ritual: I would rush inside the house ‘like a thunderstorm’, go straight to the storeroom, which was filled with the pungent smells of spices, but I would go straight to the nayachevi that would sit on a high shelf.

The taste: Crunchy, yet with bits of hardened sugar coated on the front, and maybe there would be a few of them that had a little extra.  And it was never too sweet.

It felt like our family secret, because no one outside ever really knew what it was, and even my parents never knew how to explain it. I don’t even have a photo.

We never saw her make it; it was just always ready whenever we came home for lunch on the weekend. Muthassi didn’t think much of her own creations, but my sister and I did: It was one of the flavours that filled our childhood.  

I wish that I had just asked once, how she made it.

I don’t quite remember when was the last time that I ate it, probably, because I never thought that it was the last time.  

Years later, when I tried, long after she had stopped, I asked, but she couldn’t remember it anymore. The sweet exists best in our memories, a little sweet part of a legacy that I know she would scoff at. “Nayachevi is my legacy?” I can hear her say. But along with many things, it is.

Perhaps it’s for the best that I never had step-by-step instructions, dictating when to mix, stir, and heat. I may never bring back the flavour that filled my life for those years. I like to think she took the secret with her—a secret I guard selfishly, known to no one else.

Some things taste better in memories.